


garbhapata

by AllegoriesInMediasRes



Series: Mahabharata fics [2]
Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Imprisonment, Miscarriage, Missing Scene, Oneshot, referenced child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 18:30:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19751368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegoriesInMediasRes/pseuds/AllegoriesInMediasRes
Summary: Is it a mercy, if Devaki loses a child before Kamsa can kill it?Oneshot.





	garbhapata

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for references to the murders of Devaki and Vasudev’s other children, and on-screen miscarriage. Title means “miscarriage” in Sanskrit.

Kamsa’s dubious mercy runs out after Udayin’s death, and they are banished to the dungeons, when before they had lived under house arrest in royal apartments, there to birth five more sons.

The dungeons are cold and dank, the air musty from lack of light or luck, and the fall in their circumstances makes itself known in their bodies. Devaki is ill more often, Vasudev’s joints ache before their time. Their vision blurs, their skin turns yellow, their lips crack.

Somehow, his seed still takes root in her womb, and she misses one, two, three bleedings. They do not announce her fourth (first) pregnancy, but Kamsa knows soon enough from the upwelling of their spirits, from the whispers of the guards.

Her belly has just begun to visibly swell when she feels the hot gushing between her legs, far too early. Vasudev holds her as the blood seeps out, over days and days. Nothing but blood, blood, blood, nothing to testify that she ever carried this child ( _but she_ did, _she will never even know if it was a boy or a girl, she carried a child and nobody can take that from her, not even Kamsa)._

Kamsa seethes when he learns of the miscarriage, believes that it does not count as one of the promised eight. Vasudev begs him to consider this lost child as another prophesied murderer gone, that they need bear only four more sons.

“Perhaps there never was a child at all,” Kamsa sneers, “and you staged this bloody farce to get out of your promise.”

_I felt him (her?) kick inside me, I suffered the cravings that your rations cannot satisfy, I lived with the stench of my morning sickness in my cell for months, I felt my belly crest, I felt him stop kicking, I shuddered through his bloody end._

“Five more,” Kamsa intones. “Five more sons, _real_ sons, not phantoms.”

Her sole comfort from her miscarriage was that she would lose this child to misfortune, not murder; now it seems even that is to be taken from her, and she must become a mother of nine dead in order to escape.


End file.
